“Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has spoken out about this issue as well. “Let me be clear: This subject of child abuse is an important one that should be discussed and properly investigated,” Wood said.

“It was all organized,” he continued. “There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind. There is darkness in the underbelly.”

“What bums me about these situations is that the victims can’t speak as loudly as the people in power,” Wood stated. “That’s the tragedy of attempting to reveal what is happening to innocent people: They can be squashed, but their lives have been irreparably damaged.”

Pedophilia has come up in the mainstream a lot lately, as PizzaGate came to light fairly recently and more and more pedophile rings are being exposed, some of which have involved government officials.

If you’re unfamiliar with PizzaGate, it refers to a wide range of email correspondence leaked from the DNC that allegedly unearthed a high-level elitist global pedophile ring in which the U.S. government was involved.

It emerged when Wikileaks released tens of thousands of emails from the former White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton, John Podesta, who also served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. It’s because of these emails that many claimed John Podesta was a part of these child trafficking rings as well.

Since then, conspiracy theorists and world renowned journalists alike have been looking into the topic and speculating how big this problem could be and who could be involved within these underground rings.

Not long after, Swann’s entire online personal brand and accounts had all but vanished from the internet. Why?

More recently, there’s been some speculation that these pedophile rings could stretch into pop culture, potentially involving more pedophilia scandals and symbolism within the media. The question here is: Is there any tangible evidence of all of this, or is it mere speculation?

Pedophilia Symbolism

I’d like to begin by identifying the symbols that are used by pedophiles to identify themselves and make their requests within underground networks. Here is a link to a declassified FBI document illustrating the symbols and images used by pedophiles to “identify their sexual preferences.”

So, how do these images relate to pizza? First of all, before PizzaGate was even suggested, “cheese pizza” was used as a code word to discuss “child porn” (hint: it’s the same initials, CP). A quick Google search will reveal that the market for underage sex workers is fairly substantial, and you can even see a 2015 post on Urban Dictionary that explains how “cheese pizza” is used as code for child porn.

As per PizzaGate and the symbolism, it all started when multiple emails involving John Podesta, his brother, and Hillary Clinton simply didn’t add up. Strange wording discussing pizza and cheese left readers confused, and because the emails made so little sense, it led many to suspect that they were code for something else.

For example, this email addressed to John Podesta reads: “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related),” and this email sent from John Podesta asks: “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?” There are many more examples, and I encourage you to go through the Wikileaks vault to explore.

On top of that, the DNC was associated with two pizza places, Comet Ping Pong and Besta Pizza, which use very clear symbols of pedophilia in their advertising and have strange images of children and other ritualistic type images and suspicious videos on their social media accounts – which has since been made private given the controversy over the images and their link to the DNC, but again, a quick Google search will show you what those images looked like. You can read the email correspondence between John Podesta and Comet Ping Pong’s owner, James Alefantis, here.

Former writer for the Huffington Post and Business Insider David Seaman has posted numerous YouTube videos thoroughly outlining the emails and the link to these pizza parlours and the pedophilia symbolism found within all of it. Here’s one of his videos, though I’d encourage you to watch the rest of them as well:

Here’s an image of some of the other art created by the same woman Comet Ping Pong commissioned to create the art for their pizza parlour. David Seaman discusses the art in another one of his videos. Does this look like the type of “art” a children’s artist should be creating (or anyone for that matter)?

As you may already know, PizzaGate is only speculation as of right now, though there is clearly some very damning evidence against the DNC that suggests some of the members were involved with pedophilia.

This Isn’t the First Time the Government Was Involved in Sex Scandals

Many were quick to assume that PizzaGate was entirely true because they knew of the U.S. government’s previous involvement with sex scandals and pedophilia.

For example, Ted Gunderson, former FBI special agent and head of their L.A. office, worked to uncover years’ worth of information on high-level pedophilia, sexual abuse, and satanic rituals performed by the government and the elite (or the cabal). In my opinion, Ted Gunderson is a wonderful place to start your research on this subject. You can read more about that in our CE article here.

Former U.S. representative Cynthia McKinney also knew about the government’s relationship to human trafficking, and she actually addressed it in 2005. She grilled Donald Rumsfeld on military contractor DynCorp’s child trafficking business of selling women and children (source).

Another individual involved in high-level trafficking was Jeffrey E. Epstein, a member of the financial elite infamous on Wall Street. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as fourteen. He served just over a year in jail and became a registered high-risk sex offender.

According to former U.S. State Department official Steve Pieczenik, the Clintons and many more “have been a major part and participant of what’s called the Lolita Express, which is a plane owned by Mr. Jeff Epstein, a wealthy multi-millionaire who flies down to the Bahamas and allows Bill and Hillary Clinton to engage in sex with minors — that is called Pedophilia.” (source)

Prominent names who boarded the Lolita Express include former President Bill Clinton, Naomi Campbell, Kevin Spacey, Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, and other political figures, all of whom are listed on the flight logs. Even the current U.S. President, Donald Trump, has ties to Epstein, and was in fact accused of raping a 13-year-old girl at multiple different elite sex parties with Epstein. You can see the full logs here.

“Bill Clinton . . . associated with a man like Jeffrey Epstein, who everyone in New York, certainly within his inner circles, knew was a pedophile,” explained Conchita Sarnoff, an investigative journalist who, despite being bribed to stay silent, risked her life to expose the brutal reality of human trafficking. Sarnoff also wrote a book on the Epstein case called TrafficKing. “Why would a former president associate with a man like that?” Sarnoff asked. To read more about Epstein’s case, check out our CE article here.

Numerous victims involved in elite sex rings and occult sex rituals have come forward, exposing high-level corruption related to human sex trafficking and pedophilia. One of the more recent victims to come forward is a woman named Kendall, who was sold at birth into a powerful, high-level international sex ring. You can read more about her story in our CE article here.

How Does All of This Relate to Pop Culture?

To be perfectly clear, PizzaGate and the previously discussed government scandals may not relate to pop culture whatsoever. Though there’s no question that the Illuminati and the elite are involved within the music industry, and that Monarch Mind Control and other CIA programs have played a role in creating/influencing music and media (all of which I will discuss later in this article), that doesn’t mean that there’s a direct link between these topics and pedophilia/sex rings.

However, there have been instances of pedophilia and sex rings within the entertainment industry as a whole, and there have been suggestive symbols within music videos and other media posts, and that’s what will be discussed here.

One of the best examples is actress/comedian Roseanne Barr, who has spoken out about the mind control that occurs in Hollywood. Roseanne explained in a Russia Today interview that those in Hollywood are subordinates to their “masters” (or the ruling elite) and that the fear-based culture that’s perpetuated within Hollywood is run entirely by the mind control program MK Ultra (read about it in our CE article here). MK Ultra was/is a CIA-sanctioned program that ran from the 1950s until the mid-1970s, though it allegedly continues today under the name Monarch Mind Control (MMC).

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lashed out at the UK government over Twitter on Friday after Britain’s official UN account (UK Mission to the United Nations) tweeted “A free and independent media fulfils a vital role in holding the powerful to account and giving a voice to the powerless,” with a link to a puff piece waxing eloquent over the UK’s commitment to free speech.

Assange – apparently not included in the UK’s definition of “free and independent media” (facing arrest and detention should he leave the Embassy), fired off a stunning reply – claiming that the UK’s has spent roughly twice as much spying on him as it has on their entire international human rights program.

“And that is exactly why you have detained me without charge for eight years in violation of two UN rulings and spent over 20 million pounds spying on me you hypocritical mother fuckers. Your entire international human rights programme is £10.6m you pathetic frauds.”

Assange then followed up with “Remember how I exposed your secret deal to put Saudi Arabia on the Human Rights Council?” referring to a 2015 vote-trading deal in which the UK approached Saudi Arabia in secret, promising it a seat on the UN Human Rights Council in exchange for council support.

Assange, 46, remains confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London following a failed appeal of his arrest warrant for skipping bail to enter the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault (which Sweden has dropped).

The UN, meanwhile, has twice ruled that Assange’s detention is unlawful. Despite this, the judge in his most recent appeal – Emma Arbuthnot, who said “I find arrest is a proportionate response even though Mr Assange has restricted his own freedom for a number of years.” Judge Arbuthnot’s impartiality in the Assange matter has been called into question, while her husband and ex-Conservative MP, Baron James Arbuthnot, is listed as the director of a security company along with the former head of MI6. Not exactly friends of WikiLeaks.

Moreover, a February report from the Guardian reveals that Sweden wanted to drop their case against Assange as early as 2013, but was pressured by the UK to maintain it.

The newly-released emails show that the Swedish authorities were eager to give up the case four years before they formally abandoned proceedings in 2017 and that the CPS dissuaded them from doing so.

The CPS lawyer handling the case, who has since retired, commented on an article which suggested that Sweden could drop the case in August 2012. He wrote: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”. –The Guardian

Assange Drops Bombs

In yet another angry tweet by the WikiLeaks founder, Assange replied to a two-week old comment by former Eric Holder – blaming the former Attorney General for putting him in the position to release emails from the DNC, Hillary Clinton and John Podesta during the 2016 US election.

Ostensibly getting ahead of the upcoming midterm elections in November, Holder tweeted “Russian threat to our upcoming elections: do something!” Holder then called for sanctions, ending the tweet with “We were attacked!”

Assange replied: “Attacked? By what? The truth? It’s entirely your own fault, Eric. Thanks to your unconstitutional grand jury against @WikiLeaks you left me with nothing to do but work 24/7, in harsh conditions, for years–and I’m good, very good, at my job.”

Holder, who was President Obama’s Attorney General, attempted to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange personally over the publication of military documents and US diplomatic cables regarding Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Russia-theorists” – particularly neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats, have maintained that WikiLeaks is a “cutout” for Russian to engage in information warfare, and blame Moscow for the theft and publication of the leaked emails.

Assange added to his response to Holder, tweeting “Next time, not that there will be one, try following the constitution you swore to uphold,” with a link to a 2014 article calling for Holder to drop the investigation against WikiLeaks or resign.

Behind the scenes, Sweden wanted to drop the extradition case against Assange back in 2013. Why was this not made public? Because Britain persuaded Sweden to pretend that they still wished to pursue the case.

In other words, for more than four years Assange has been holed up in a tiny room, policed at great cost to British taxpayers, not because of any allegations in Sweden but because the British authorities wanted him to remain there.

On what possible grounds could that be, one has to wonder? Might it have something to do with his work as the head of Wikileaks, publishing information from whistleblowers that has severely embarrassed the United States and the UK.

In fact, Assange should have walked free years ago if this was really about an investigation – a sham one at that – into an alleged sexual assault in Sweden. Instead, as Assange has long warned, there is a very different agenda at work: efforts to extradite him onwards to the US, where he could be locked away for good. That was why UN experts argued two years ago that he was being “arbitrarily detained” – for political crimes – not unlike the situation of dissidents in other parts of the world who are supported by western liberals and leftists.

According to a new release of emails between officials, the Swedish director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, wrote to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service on 18 October 2013, warning that Swedish law would not allow the case for extradition to be continued. This was, remember, after Sweden had repeatedly failed to take up an offer from Assange to interview him in London, as had happened in 44 other extradition cases between Sweden and Britain.

Ny wrote to the CPS: “We have found us to be obliged to lift the detention order … and to withdraw the European arrest warrant. If so this should be done in a couple of weeks. This would affect not only us but you too in a significant way.”

Three days later, suggesting that legal concerns were far from anyone’s mind, she emailed the CPS again: “I am sorry this came as a [bad] surprise… I hope I didn’t ruin your weekend.”

In a similar vein, proving that this was about politics, not the law, the chief CPS lawyer handling the case in the UK, had earlier written to the Swedish prosecutors: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

In December 2013, the unnamed CPS lawyer again wrote to Ny: “I do not consider costs are a relevant factor in this matter.” This was at a time when it had been revealed that the policing of Assange’s detention in the embassy had cost Britain at that point £3.8 million. In another email from the CPS, it was noted: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

These are only fragments of the email correspondence, after most of it was destroyed by the CPS against its own protocols. The deletions appear to have been carried out to avoid releasing the electronic files to a tribunal that has been considering a freedom of information request.

Other surviving emails, according to a Guardian report last year, have shown that the CPS “advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange. An interview at that time could have prevented the long-running embassy standoff.”

Assange is still holed up in the embassy, at great risk to his physical and mental health, even though last year Sweden formally dropped an investigation that in reality it had not actually been pursuing for more than four years.

Now the UK (read US) authorities have a new, even less credible pretext for continuing to hold Assange: because he “skipped bail”. Apparently the price he should pay for this relatively minor infraction is more than five years of confinement.

London magistrates are due to consider on Tuesday the arguments of Assange’s lawyers that he should be freed and that after so many years the continuing enforcement of the arrest warrant is disproportionate. Given the blurring of legal and political considerations in this case, don’t hold your breath that Assange will finally get a fair hearing.

Remember too that, according to the UK Foreign Office, Ecuador recently notified it that Assange had received diplomatic status following his successful application for Ecuadorean citizenship.

As former British ambassador Craig Murray has explained, the UK has no choice but to accept Assange’s diplomatic immunity. The most it can do is insist that he leave the country – something that Assange and Ecuador presumably each desire. And yet the UK continues to ignore its obligation to allow Assange his freedom to leave. So far there has been zero debate in the British corporate media about this fundamental violation of his rights.

One has to wonder at what point will most people realise that this is – and always was – political persecution masquerading as law enforcement.

Julian Assange’s latest attempt to have his outstanding UK arrest warrant dropped has failed in what stands as one of the most blatant and cruel examples of the British legal system being wielded as an instrument of persecution against a man whose only crime is speaking truth to power.

The judge presiding over his case, and who summarily dismissed it, was ‘Lady Arbuthnot of Edrom’. Yes, you read that right. In the second decade of the 21st century the UK legal system is still dominated by the kind of people whose morning workout consists of flogging the butler. Lady Arbuthnot also happens to be the wife of Tory peer and former junior Defence Minister Lord James Arbuthnot, whose father was Major Sir John Sinclair Wemyss Arbuthnot.

By now you should be getting the idea. These ridiculous products of privilege and the British public school system (private education for those unfamiliar with the quixotic and arcane code of the British ruling elite) are the guardians of a status quo of class oppression at home and imperialism abroad. In daring to rip off the mask of civility and moral rectitude behind which they and their masters in the US have long carried out their acts of brutality and barbarity at home and around the world, Assange is on the receiving end of their considerable wrath.

If Julian Assange had been confined to a foreign embassy in Moscow or Beijing for five years, on the same grounds on which he has been confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, his plight would have been a cause celebre, sparking calls for boycotts, sanctions, and action at the UN on the part of free speech and prisoner of conscience liberals in the West who are never done excoriating Russia and China.

As it is the UN has already intervened in the matter of the plight of the Wikileaks founder. In February 2016 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the “arbitrary detention of Julian Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation.”

Given that the Swedish authorities dropped their investigation into the original charges of rape and sexual molestation – made against Assange in 2010 and which he has always denied and claims were politically motivated – the outstanding UK arrest warrant for breaching bail conditions in 2012 which relates to those charges is surely now moot. Julian Assange, you may recall, sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London fearing not extradition to Sweden but to the US over his role as founder and public face of Wikileaks.

In 2018 not only does the threat of extradition to the US continue to hang over him with this outstanding UK arrest warrant, if anything the threat is even greater, what with the part Wikileaks played in disseminating damning facts about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the leadership of the DNC in the run up to the 2016 US presidential election. The ensuing Washington liberal establishment rage that has ensued as a result of Clinton losing the election to Donald Trump has been positively volcanic.

Clinton, her supporters, and elements of the Washington establishment claim that the information Wikileaks published came by way of Russian hacking, while Assange and groups such as Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), made up of former US intelligence operatives and officials, maintain that the information came by way of a leak within Washington itself. Meanwhile, up to this point, the investigation into alleged Russian hacking, Russiagate, is yet to produce one scintilla of concrete evidence that any such hacking on the part of Moscow took place.

Again, the real crime Julian Assange committed was not breaching his bail conditions but daring to speak truth to power. Wikileaks under his stewardship has become the bête noire of governments, particularly Western governments, revealing the ugly truth of crimes committed by US forces in Iraq, the West’s role in the destabilization of Ukraine in 2014, the destruction of Libya – and this is without the part the whistleblowing outfit played in exposing Hillary Clinton as a politician whose record is a monument to mendacity.

Wikileaks is and continues to be a thorn in their side and must be destroyed. Which means that Julian Assange must be destroyed, a man who teaches us that believing you live in a free society and actually behaving as if you do is not the same thing. The former allows you to exist in a bubble of soporific comfort, while the latter is liable to get you confined to a foreign embassy for five years and counting.

The personal toll on Assange’s physical and psychological well being as a result of his confinement should not be overlooked. Indeed the toll it is having was recently confirmed by the medical opinion of two clinicians, who upon examining Assange at the embassy in October 2017 renewed calls for him to be granted safe passage to a London hospital for treatment. In an article for the Guardian, the clinicians write: “While the results of the evaluation are protected by doctor-patient confidentiality, it is our professional opinion that his continued confinement is dangerous physically and mentally to him and a clear infringement of his human right to healthcare.”

It bears repeating: Julian Assange, as was Chelsea Manning, as will be Edward Snowden if he dares set foot outside Russia, is being punished for removing the veil of freedom, human rights, and civil liberties from the face of an empire of hypocrisy and lies. They lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Syria, and they lie every day about the murky relationships between governments, corporations, and the rich that negates their oft made claims to be governing in the interests of the people.

John Wightis the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir –Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1

“We need a political intervention to make this situation end. He (Assange) is the only political prisoner in Western Europe.” Juan Braco

The persecution of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is now seven years old. Ecuador has protected Assange for the past half decade from being turned over to Washington by the corrupt Swedish and British for torture and prosecution as a spy by giving Assange political asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Ecuador has now given citizenship to Assange and attempted to provide his safe transit out of England by giving him diplomatic status, but the British government continued in its assigned role of jailer by rejecting Ecuador’s request for diplomatic status for Assange, just as the most servile of Washington’s puppet states rejected the order by the UN Committee on Arbitrary Detention to immediate release Assange from his arbitrary detention.

Assange got into trouble with Washington, because his news organization, Wikileaks, published files released by Bradley Manning. The files were a tremendous embarrassment to Washington, because they showed how Washington conspires against governments and betrays its allies, and the files contained an audio/video film of US military forces murdering innocent people walking down a street and then murdering a father and his two young children who stopped to give aid to the civilians the American soldiers had shot. The film revealed the heartlessness and criminal cruelty of the US troops, who were enjoying playing a real live video game with real people as their victims.

It was Manning who suffered, not the troops who committed murder. Manning was held for two years in conditions that experts said constituted torture while a case was framed against him. Some believe the harsh conditions affected his mind. Manning was convicted by a kangaroo court and sentenced to 35 years in prison, but Obama in an act of humanity unusual for Washington pardoned Manning.

Washington wanted Assange as well, and the chance came when two Swedish women, attracted to Assange by his celebrity status, seduced him. The two women had not secured the cooperation they wanted from Assange in the use of condoms and, brainwashd by HIV fears, wanted Assange to join them in being tested.

Assange, misreading the extent of their fears, was too slow to comply, and the women went to the police to see if he could be required to be tested. According to the women, the police made up the charge of rape. The women themselves disavow the charge.

The charges were investigated, and the chief Swedish prosecutor Eva Finne dismissed the charges, saying “there is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”

Mysteriously, the case was reopened by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who many suspect was operating at the behest of Washington. On November 30, two days after Assange began publishing the Cablegate materials leaked by Bradley Manning, Ny issued an Interpol “red alert” arrest warrant for Assange. This was an unusual request as no charges were outstanding against Assange, and hitherto extradition from one country to another on an arrest warrant required actual charges, whereas Ny said she wanted Assange for questioning. Most everyone in the know understood that Washington had ordered Sweden to get its hands on Assange and to turn him over to Washington.

Assange challenged the legality of the arrest warrant in British courts, but the British court, many believe following Washington’s orders, ruled against the law and in favor of Washington. Assange assented to the arrest and presented himself to a British police station. He was placed in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison. If memory serves, the daughter of Sir James Goldsmith paid his bond and he was placed under house arrest. When it became clear that the Swedish prosecutor wanted Assange for Washington, not for any charges against him in Sweden, Ecuador give him asylum, and he fled to the embassy in London.

Where he has been ever since.

Sweden has closed the case a second time, and Assange is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden. Therefore, there is no longer any reason for the British to hold him for Sweden. But the British government never were holding Assange for Sweden. The British were holding him for Washington. And they still are. Even though Sweden has closed a case based on a false report by police and have no basis for any charges against Assange, the British government says it will grab him the minute he steps outside the embassy.

The British are so desperate to serve their Washington master that once they even declared that they were going to violate diplomatic immunity and invade the Ecuadorian Embassy and seize Assange.

The British excuse for a once proud government’s continuing servitude to Washington as Assange’s jailer is that by taking asylum in the embassy Assange jumped bail and therefore the British have to arrest him for not surrendering a second time to the police for an investigation that has been closed.

Stefania Maurizi, an Italian investigative journalist for La Repubblica, smelling the stench of fraud that covers the entire case, has been trying for two years to get her hands on the correspondence between the UK, US, and Swedish governments pertaining to the case in order to pull back the shroud of the Washington-orchestrated propaganda that colors the case. A British tribunal refused to release any documents on the grounds that it had to protect the British Prosecution Service’s relationship with foreign authorities.

That tells you all you need to know. Julian Assange has lost seven years of his life because stinking dirty Washington wanted revenge on Assange for exercising the US Constitution-protected right of a free press, and the stinking dirty governments of Sweden and Britain did Washington’s dirty work. What we know for certain is that Assange is totally innocent and that there is no honor and no integrity in the US, Swedish, and British governments. Law means nothing to the scum that misrule these countries.

In the US and probably throughout Europe, politicians and feminists, with the exception of Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff, used the presstitute media to paint Assange as a rapist and as a spy. The feminists cared nothing about any truth; they just wanted a man to demonize. Truth was the last thing on politicians’ minds. They just wanted to divert attention from Washington’s crimes and betrayals of allies by portraying Assange as a threat and traitor to America. They were unconcerned that Assange could not be a traitor to America as he is not an American citizen. In actual fact, there is no basis in law for any US claim against Assange. Yet because of Washington and its servile British puppet state, Assange remains interred in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Clearly, honor and respect for law reside in Ecuador, not in the US, UK, or Sweden.

But facts, along with law and civil liberty, have ceased to mean anything in the Western world. The corrupt US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the arrest of Assange is a “priority.” The British police, mere lackeys of Washington, said that they would still arrest Assange, despite the case being dropped, if he left the embassy.

For the British, serving Washington is a higher calling than the honor of their country.

The Australian-born activist took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012 [File:Reuters]

Ecuador has granted citizenship to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in its London embassy for more than five years.

Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Ecuador’s foreign minister, told reporters on Thursday that the South American country accepted Assange’s application for naturalisation in December.

“What naturalisation does is provide the asylum seeker another layer of protection,” she told reporters in Quito.

The Australian-born activist took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in the UK capital in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, amid fears that he would have been handed over to the US to face prosecution over the publication of classified military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.

He was wanted in Sweden for questioning over rape accusations. Prosecutors there dropped the case last year, but Assange remained in the embassy after British police said he would still be arrested for violating bail conditions.

Assange posted a photograph of himself wearing a yellow Ecuadorean national football team jersey on Twitter on Wednesday.

Espinosa said Ecuador had asked the UK to grant diplomatic status to Assange in a bid to secure immunity and safe passage, but the request was rejected.

The UK’s Foreign Office, in a statement earlier in the day, said, “Ecuador knows that the way to resolve this issue is for Julian Assange to leave the embassy to face justice”.

Espinosa said the issue was not about Assange facing British law, but “founded fears that we have about possible risks to the life and integrity of citizen Assange, not necessarily from the United Kingdom, but possibly by third states”.

Ecuador was obliged to give him protection as “long as the life, integrity of this protected person could be at risks and danger,” she said, adding that her government was exploring other options to resolve the seven-year standoff.

When he last spoke with Reason in 1973, Daniel Ellsberg was on trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The Harvard-educated military analyst at the RAND Corporation had long wrestled with many of the moral quandaries of war, but was a consummate Washington insider up until the moment he decided to release a classified Department of Defense study of the Vietnam War, with its damning proof that President Lyndon Johnson had misled Congress and the public about the conflict.

While it looked like Ellsberg might spend the rest of his life behind bars, he was saved—ironically—by Richard Nixon’s paranoid dealings, which included sending goons to break into Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist’s office and allegedly plotting to have him killed.

If the original leaking plan had gone Ellsberg’s way, he suspects he might be in prison still. As he relates in his new book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury), along with the now-familiar thousands of pages on Vietnam, he had unprecedented civilian access to nuclear planning documents in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. He swiped and copied them as well. Unfortunately, Ellsberg gave the nuclear documents to his brother, who buried them for safekeeping until the Pentagon Papers trial was over. A hurricane collapsed the hill where they were hidden, and they were lost to history. Ellsberg has had 45 years to wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t been, and more than 60 years to be unnerved by the recklessness, poor planning, and misinformation rampant in an area of policy with the highest possible stakes.

Today, Ellsberg is the 86-year-old elder statesmen of whistleblowing. He calls Edward Snowden “a hero of mine.” In return, Snowden has said he was following in Ellsberg’s footsteps when he leaked his own cache of secret government documents in 2013.

Reason spoke with Ellsberg by phone in October about his new book, his belief that nobody needs more nuclear weapons than Kim Jong Un has, and why the Cold War’s apocalyptic threats still hang over us.

Reason: Do you still get people calling you a traitor, and do you anticipate getting more of that on Twitter, now that you have a presence there?

Daniel Ellsberg: For decades I used to say that being called “traitor” is something you never get used to. But the truth is, for humans, you get used to anything. After 40 years, it doesn’t get a big rise out of me anymore.

It did very much at first. As a person whose identification was patriotism in a very conventional way—after all, I did go into the Marines, and I volunteered to go to Vietnam—the idea of being called traitor was very, very painful. But even at the beginning, I felt that people who would use that term didn’t understand our country very well, or our Constitution.

In many other countries, you work for a führer, to use the German word: a leader. And the leader is the government. You can’t criticize the administration without being regarded as treasonous. That’s one of the reasons that a revolution was fought over here, a war of independence.

Bettmann/Getty

In my case, the loyalty was to the Constitution and to the country rather than to the administration. Every officer in all the armed services and every member of the Congress and every official in the executive branch all take the same oath. The president’s is a little bit different, but everybody else has the same one, and it’s not to a leader, and it’s not to secrecy. It’s to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I had been violating that oath, I would say, when I knew that a president was violating the Constitution and waging war under false pretenses. In the end, I felt that the right thing to do, definitely, was to tell the Congress and the public what was being done in their name. That certainly seemed to me like being a better patriot than I had been.

When you last spoke to Reason more than 40 years ago, you said you were a former Cold War Democrat who was “in transition” and “very influenced by the people who are radical pacifists and anarchists.” I’m curious about how you would describe your politics since then.

I was influenced really by nonviolent activists in the Gandhian tradition and the Martin Luther King tradition. Giving the Pentagon Papers was a radical action. It involved truth telling and risk to myself. I expected to go to prison for life.

I still want to live up to that tradition. But I never became a total pacifist. I don’t agree with those of my friends who are critical of all wars. The truth is, though, that there hasn’t been one since the Second World War that I could really recognize on our part as having been justified or worthwhile. So I remain very much anti-imperial and very skeptical of intervention.

I found it interesting that you use World War II as an example of a justified war. In your recent book, there’s some mention of your dislike of the tactics the Allies used.

Well, look, to say that I thought the war was just and even necessary against Hitler does not mean that I would endorse our tactics. I thought that the firebombing of Germany toward the later stages, and the entire bombing of Japan, which consisted of trying to kill as many Japanese civilians as possible, was a clear-cut war crime from beginning to end. Indeed, if you’re really to take the idea of war crimes seriously, no question, it should have been prosecuted.

I don’t think you can understand the nuclear age and how it came to be if you don’t know the history of World War II. Most people don’t know—they bought the government line that our effort was only to hit military targets in a narrow sense, and that other people were being hit only by accident, in what we now call collateral damage. That was a flat-out lie from ’42 on. They were imitating the Nazi tactics in the blitz. That departed entirely from the notion of “just practice” in war, as opposed to “just cause.” Unfortunately, that precedent worked itself out in the worst possible way. The legitimation [of using nuclear weapons] really came before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in turn simply reflected what our Air Force had been doing for the previous year.

By the way, are you asking these questions from the point of view of a total pacifist?

I’m OK with self-defense, but I think it’s hard to find a justified war even if you think some conflicts within that war were justified.

The occasional somewhat violent uprising is successful, but it’s very few. That’s why I’m much more committed to the idea of nonviolent resistance efforts of various kinds. But in the case of [justified tactics during] World War II, I would point to the British actions in the Battle of Britain. The dogfights in the air, but also anti-aircraft [attacks] against bombers. I not only see that as justified—or as some pacifists will say, “I don’t condemn that”—I think they were doing the right thing. They did prevent the invasion of Britain. And I don’t think that nonviolent tactics against those bomber planes would have been as effective at all.

I agree. But there are people who slide from that into “and therefore every Allied tactic was justified because they had to win, and they did win, and therefore they had to do all that in order to win.”

Yeah. But that’s based just on an assumption. It doesn’t bear up to real historical analysis of what exactly happened and whether it was necessary or not. Sure, people will say that at the time they thought the bombing of cities was not only effective but necessary. But that turned out to be untrue. There remains no justification, and that was fairly clear as the war was going on. It had to be kept from the public in both Britain and America because the leaders knew that it did not stand up morally.

“In the end, I felt that the right thing to do, definitely, was to tell the Congress and the public what was being done in their name.”

The Russians were fighting under Stalin for a terrible regime, and many of them knew it—but they were fighting against Nazi invaders. A pacifist friend of mine recently said, “Look, they lost 20 million people. What could be worse than that?” A fair question, except that if one was to look into the German plans you’d see that what they had in mind was depopulating Russia to the point of killing by starvation 30–40 million people.

So even under the terrible conditions of the Russian front, they were fighting for their lives, and I think justifiably.

Let’s talk about your new book. Could you sum up the bizarre circumstances by which you lost the other papers?

I decided in 1969 when I started copying the Pentagon Papers that, since I’m doing this, I should really put out information far more significant than the information on Vietnam, and that was the dangers for human existence that we have been building up and which the Russians have been imitating now for some years.

I copied everything in my top-secret safe, much of which dealt with nuclear matters. Not operational details, but the fact that we were contemplating first use and first strike—disarming attacks on the Soviet Union—and this resulted in a very dangerous situation, especially because the Russians were doing the same.

I was influenced by the example of draft resisters like Randy Kehler, who were on their way to prison for nonviolent resistance to the draft. I concluded that if that was the right thing for these young men to do, I could and should do that also, by telling the truth. I saw Randy Kehler just before he was due to go to prison in San Francisco, and I told him what I was doing at that very moment in the way of copying. He thought it wasn’t important to put out the Pentagon Papers, because enough about Vietnam had come out already. What was really new and important was the nuclear material. I said, “Well, I agree with him on the importance, but Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now, and I want to do what I can to shorten that war by informing people what was being done in their name.” My plan really was to go through my trial—maybe a couple of trials, for distribution as well as copying—and then put out the nuclear papers.

That didn’t happen because I gave them to my brother who, to shorten the story, hid them in a town dump, and a hurricane actually came through and disturbed the trash field that he’d buried them in, including moving the stove that he’d used to mark the location. It’s just impossible to find the box containing the nuclear papers anymore.